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Help with scaffolding


lauraw4321
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Oldest DD is 13 (ignore sig) and has moderate / severe ADHD.  DH and I kind of had a panic moment when we realized we only have 5 more years with her until she goes to college. We need to get her to really take on and handle certain tasks without being reminded / cajoled. These are things like

  • Taking her medicine and eating breakfast / drinking water when she wakes up
  • Brush hair and teeth

We've made checklists and signs, and they haven't been successful.  I need help knowing how to help her. TIA.

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I see that no one has answered.  A few thoughts -

My Aspie with severe ADHD did learn these things later on when he had to. 

Would she respond to alarms/reminders on her phone?  We put out all my son's meds in a seven-day pill container once a week together.  That helped to be able to see if the pills were still in "Monday's" box, for example.

Hair - if she didn't brush her hair what would happen?  Would she care what others thought?  (Just wondering if peer pressure could motivate her.  Not recommending that you "threaten" her with people not liking her etc.) 

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2 hours ago, lauraw4321 said:

Oldest DD is 13 (ignore sig) and has moderate / severe ADHD.  DH and I kind of had a panic moment when we realized we only have 5 more years with her until she goes to college. We need to get her to really take on and handle certain tasks without being reminded / cajoled. These are things like

  • Taking her medicine and eating breakfast / drinking water when she wakes up
  • Brush hair and teeth

We've made checklists and signs, and they haven't been successful.  I need help knowing how to help her. TIA.

I don’t have any advice for you other than to remind you that, although 5 years seems like a short time to you, it’s practically a lifetime in terms of maturity for a 13yo, so please try not to worry too much.

I think you are smart to want to develop a plan of action for helping her gradually accept more responsibility, but if things seem to be taking longer than you had hoped, you still have plenty of time to work with your dd — and if it takes even longer than 5 years, she can always commute to college until she is ready to live away from home.

I guess my only point is that you still have plenty of time, and 18 doesn’t have to be the deadline for when your dd is ready to go away to college. (But after 5 more years, she will probably be far more mature than she is now, and she might surprise you at how far she has come — and you’ll wonder why you were worried! 🙂)

 

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One, come over to LC. Two, she's still young yet. Some of the spurt you're wanting to see is going to be 14-16, meaning you're just too early yet.

Work on self awareness, working to a checklist. You're going to need to *chain* things and build routine. So for instance, I keep my ds' notebook with his schedule for the day at the location where he takes his morning vitamins. So if he gets there (with a visual prompt like me quietly pointing) then he gets multiple things done in one place.

Fwiw, severe ADHD merges into ASD. You may get more mileage if you start reading about ASD supports as well. Read about faded prompts and see if they could help you. So you have really explicit prompts, like you standing there telilng her what to do, but then you can fade it back. (tell her but the night before instead of in the moment, or point instead of saying something, or point to her list that has the tasks, etc) 

There are other things you can do with tech, depending on how compliant/willing/motivated she is. (wearables, apps on her tech devices, well placed amazon fire/echo/dot products, etc.)

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1 minute ago, Catwoman said:

I don’t have any advice for you other than to remind you that, although 5 years seems like a short time to you, it’s practically a lifetime in terms of maturity for a 13yo, so please try not to worry too much.

Amen!

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25 minutes ago, PeterPan said:

One, come over to LC. Two, she's still young yet. Some of the spurt you're wanting to see is going to be 14-16, meaning you're just too early yet.

Work on self awareness, working to a checklist. You're going to need to *chain* things and build routine. So for instance, I keep my ds' notebook with his schedule for the day at the location where he takes his morning vitamins. So if he gets there (with a visual prompt like me quietly pointing) then he gets multiple things done in one place.

Fwiw, severe ADHD merges into ASD. You may get more mileage if you start reading about ASD supports as well. Read about faded prompts and see if they could help you. So you have really explicit prompts, like you standing there telilng her what to do, but then you can fade it back. (tell her but the night before instead of in the moment, or point instead of saying something, or point to her list that has the tasks, etc) 

DH and I were just talking about the ASD possibility. It’s been in the back of my mind awhile and he’s starting to see that possibility as well. 
 

I’ll look at the LC board. Thank you. 

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1 hour ago, Catwoman said:

I don’t have any advice for you other than to remind you that, although 5 years seems like a short time to you, it’s practically a lifetime in terms of maturity for a 13yo, so please try not to worry too much.

I think you are smart to want to develop a plan of action for helping her gradually accept more responsibility, but if things seem to be taking longer than you had hoped, you still have plenty of time to work with your dd — and if it takes even longer than 5 years, she can always commute to college until she is ready to live away from home.

I guess my only point is that you still have plenty of time, and 18 doesn’t have to be the deadline for when your dd is ready to go away to college. (But after 5 more years, she will probably be far more mature than she is now, and she might surprise you at how far she has come — and you’ll wonder why you were worried! 🙂)

 

 

1 hour ago, PeterPan said:

One, come over to LC. Two, she's still young yet. Some of the spurt you're wanting to see is going to be 14-16, meaning you're just too early yet.

Work on self awareness, working to a checklist. You're going to need to *chain* things and build routine. So for instance, I keep my ds' notebook with his schedule for the day at the location where he takes his morning vitamins. So if he gets there (with a visual prompt like me quietly pointing) then he gets multiple things done in one place.

Fwiw, severe ADHD merges into ASD. You may get more mileage if you start reading about ASD supports as well. Read about faded prompts and see if they could help you. So you have really explicit prompts, like you standing there telilng her what to do, but then you can fade it back. (tell her but the night before instead of in the moment, or point instead of saying something, or point to her list that has the tasks, etc) 

There are other things you can do with tech, depending on how compliant/willing/motivated she is. (wearables, apps on her tech devices, well placed amazon fire/echo/dot products, etc.)

I have to agree with both of these posts. We have one severely inattentive ADHD. Body care is still really hit or miss, but at 16, we’re seeing growing awareness. He’s working out of the home now, so that is helping. 
 

He sets his alarm orally on Alexa. We try to remember to doublecheck  that it’s set on our app. 😉 

I can remember at 14 and 15 thinking, “We are going to have to call you (as an adult) to tell you to bathe and take meds.”  And, now at least, it is foreseeable that maybe that won’t be the case? But what if? What if you were going to have to walk through routines for years? Not because they WON’T take that responsibility, but because they can’t? I posted a very frustrated post with DS’ ADHD and not taking meds reliably a couple years ago (diff board) and someone I respected said, “Are you frustrated that he can’t or he won’t?” Because it’s not functionally useful to be upset with ‘can’t’ - if he isn’t there developmentally then he just wasn’t. For me, this was THE problem. In my head, I was saying, “By this age, a kid should be able to....” But the kid in front of me? He wasn’t there yet. I think the creation of routines then the reminder, “Mentally (or physically) run through your morning/evening checklist. Did you do everything?” is scaffolding if she can do that. I’ma person who NEEDS to make a list to be effective, even at 44, so no issue with checklists! 😉 

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My youngest uses phone alarms pretty extensively, and has been very successful with managing her medications that way.  

Tooth brushing is a whole nother story.  I realized the other day that we had been home from our trip for a week, and there were only two toothbrushes in the bathroom, one of which was mine.  I was like, "Um, so who all is not brushing their teeth?"  Turns out my husband has also been using my youngest's toothbrush for a week, and oldest, the one who is supposedly neurotypical, just hasn't brushed their teeth in a week.

On the other hand, they've never had a cavity, so while I am concerned about developing the skills for this task, apparently it doesn't make all that much difference for them?  

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There's also something op can think about called "problem solving" and it's something SLPs will typically do in testing with these kids. There's executive function and problem solving. So you're looking for something like the Test of Problem Solving. So you have all these steps, like can they motor plan it, does their EF help them remember it, do they get the idea of the sequence, etc. but also then do they recognize they have a PROBLEM and do they know how to SOLVE it?

Not knowing how to solve a problem is not a behavior problem so much as the immaturity and developmental issues. My ds has a gifted IQ and there was a point a couple years ago where we were working on *the steps to wipe up a spill*. I kid you not. 

So for things that matter, things that are relevant or motivating to my ds, I try to use problem solving discussions if that makes sense. *This* is the problem and *what* is your plan for it? What could be your plan, what are the options? You'll probably get a lot of blank stares at first, hehe. Kids with issues with problem solving aren't necessarily thinking that way about life, about literature, about social, about anything. 

https://mindwingconcepts.com/products/the-critical-thinking-triangle-in-action-1  Here's something to get you started on that. Look at the pictures and see if she has a youtube about it.

Here, sorry this is a little long, but it will be good stuff. When I say motivated, I mean they have feelings about it. (They want to do it, they don't like how they feel if they don't, etc.) 

 

 

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Just now, Terabith said:

My youngest uses phone alarms pretty extensively, and has been very successful with managing her medications that way.  

Yes, yes!! My ds sets alarms on his tiny inexpensive Kindle fire tablet thing. It set them on my phone. I also set them on my amazon fire tv. I keep one in the kitchen, a bit outside my bedroom, and if something is important I'm going to set alarms on that AND on the phone in my bath, lol. We have another fire tv device in the basement and we put a recurring alarm onto that to remind ds to feed the dog. 

I griped about my dd for years and she just somehow magically got most of her act together at some point. Time can help. My ds has ASD2 and he really needs specific instruction to learn to do tasks. It's not going to just happen, but his good attitude (so far, haha) helps. That's why I'm all over the faded prompts, because I need the task to happen without him feeling harangued. We've done some with alarms on a wrist device. I went too crazy with them and he got frustrated. It's still there as an option, so we'll see. That's that collaborative problem solving thing where you talk through the problem and options. 

So with my ds, I'm looking for incremental progress. We're talking really stupid small increments. He takes vitamins 4X a day, so it used to be I had to lay them out and verbally prompt. Now I can give him a faded prompt and he will go take them out himself. That's huge progress, even though reality is I'm still prompting, kwim? 

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It's an issue.  It's still an issue---not something that has been aged out of at our house.

AFA scaffolding goes, it's figuring out what works for that particular kid.  I also have a kid that I have modeled checklists and such for for literally years of time. We're at about a decade now.  We've figured out what doesn't work.  What is currently working is chaining to something they automatically do daily. Automatically, daily, they check their phone.  We put the pillbox by the phone and with their week planner right there.  Their week planner has a daily checklist and for whatever reason, things are finally coming together (I hope).

The morning checklist currently looks like:

meds (because nothing else happens if the meds don't)

check calendar for the day

check phone for texts and emails

check laptop (university scholastic calendar)

eat (also key to being functional)

shower

shave

teeth: brush, floss, retainer cleaned and put in case

-----

All of these things are also all chained: the bathroom bag with the shave kit etc. are all next to the phone as well.  The phone is next to the laptop. There's a granola bar there as well. The retainer case is in the bathroom bag.  They cannot run all over the house to do steps of things in that first critical thirty minutes before the meds kick in or they just lose the time.  They also can't get sucked into their phone or apps or they also just lose time. 

Other things we have done: taped post-it notes with what goes into the pillbox on the back of the pillbox, and covered it with packing tape so it's relatively waterproof; pre-loaded granola bars and a water bottle next to the phone & laptop; separated work and school clothes in the closet so if it's work first thing in the day, all of that is ready to go; and created a designated spot for each thing.  His work stuff is all together in a place. It does not go any other place.  When he returns home from work, it goes into the place.  This all has to become automatic, and that takes time.

He has a smart phone with a ton of reminders and popups.  It is one of the three things that really makes him functional.  Seriously, don't hesitate to buy a smart phone with calendaring that synchs to a laptop as your child ages. 

My son is really, really bright.  He's very highly functioning except in the executive functioning area.  He has university studies down, he has work down, it's that first hour of awakeness that is pretty ugly + all of the non-routine things in life that we're still working on managing.

 

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Fwiw, this is why I cruise. Going on vacation with someone who needs significant support is still WORK. Cruising is the only time when I've felt completely, blissfully relaxed. The only parts I had to make happen for him where the supplements/medications. Eating, well dude there's an ice cream machine and buffets, knock yourself out. Every other vacation is such a pain in the butt with him. Like I do it (traveling places), but it's work. 

So do some mom care. Seriously.

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3 minutes ago, prairiewindmomma said:

it's that first hour of awakeness that is pretty ugly

Oh my. It got a little better with my dd when she started the ADHD meds. It was like they kept her from going SO far down into sleepy waves that she could actually come out and be human sooner. But I wake up ON, like seriously on. Like doing calculus on. And ds does too, lol. He likes some time to himself, but it's not 1 ½-2 hours like dd was. He just needs like 30-45 minutes for his stuff to kick in and he's functional. 

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